Workshop: Cryptography in the Clouds

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

A fast growing worldwide trend is to view computation as a commodity: Instead of maintaining their own computer systems, organizations or individuals may pay specialized providers to carry out the desired computation for them. This trend (often called "Cloud Computing") carries with it great promise in terms of overall computing efficiency, power consumption, and financial flexibility. However, it also opens the door to much more acute security threats than those we have encountered so far: Without additional protection, the client must completely trust the provider to perform the computation correctly, and at the same time keep the secrecy of the clients' most sensitive private data. Allowing the client to benefit from this service without putting such an unreasonable amount of trust in the provider turns out to be an extremely complex and delicate task. In particular, traditional cryptographic techniques and concepts are of no help here. Indeed, the cryptographic community is recently abuzz with a set of new techniques that are aimed at dealing with such adversarial scenarios. These include exciting new techniques for: - Computation on encrypted data (often called "fully homomorphic encryption") - Verifiable Delegated Computation - Program Obfuscation - Leakage-Resilient Cryptography - Circular Encryption - Searchable and Conditionally Decryptable Encryption The workshop will bring together researchers that work on different aspects of this problem, allowing for exchange of ideas and coming up with new research directions.